Friday, March 9, 2012

Log shipping failover

Is it possible to failover a single or a selected number of databases
onto a standby server? We're currently log shipping about 12 databases
to a standby and I was wondering if it was possible to randomly
failover onto selected dbs.

My understanding of log shipping is that when the primary server goes
down, the standby takes over. But, does that mean that all of the db's
on the standby server now become the primary? Or, can failover occur on
selected dbs?

The reason I ask is because if one db on the primary, for example, was
to go down, I'd like to be able to bring the particular db on the
standby server online while I fix or restore what's on the primary
server. Can it be done individually or is it an all or nothing
scenario?

Your personal advice or links is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
PepstheSpinel (thespinel@.gmail.com) writes:
> Is it possible to failover a single or a selected number of databases
> onto a standby server? We're currently log shipping about 12 databases
> to a standby and I was wondering if it was possible to randomly
> failover onto selected dbs.
> My understanding of log shipping is that when the primary server goes
> down, the standby takes over. But, does that mean that all of the db's
> on the standby server now become the primary? Or, can failover occur on
> selected dbs?
> The reason I ask is because if one db on the primary, for example, was
> to go down, I'd like to be able to bring the particular db on the
> standby server online while I fix or restore what's on the primary
> server. Can it be done individually or is it an all or nothing
> scenario?

As far as I know there is no automatic failover with log shipping, but
you would have to failover clients manually.

If you are using database mirroring, failover can be automatic, and I
assume that this is per database, but I don't know.

--
Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP, esquel@.sommarskog.se

Books Online for SQL Server 2005 at
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/pr...oads/books.mspx
Books Online for SQL Server 2000 at
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/prodin...ions/books.mspx

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